Adjuncts and professional development
There’s an article in today’s Insider Higher Ed on a professional development program for adjunct instructors at Valencia Community College, Florida. The opening paragraph of the story asks,
“Professional development programs to share the latest teaching techniques tend to be designed in ways that effectively exclude part timers, who can’t be expected to be on campus at odd hours, without pay, when they need to teach elsewhere to make a living. What’s wrong with this picture?”
Here in Chicago, the City Colleges system (my summer employer) has a professional development program for part-time online instructors. Unlike other places I’ve worked, where setting up an online course is just a quick copy-paste job from the last semester and the course itself is primarily a solo affair, the Center for Distance Learning (CDL) has quite a few requirements for online adjuncts:
- We have to take an online class that covers the CDL policies and Blackboard system
- We have to take two online courses through the Illinois Online Network (ION)
- If we continue to teach, we must continue taking courses through ION until we obtain certification in designing online courses
- Each adjunct has an Instructional Design Manager (IDM) who oversees the creation of course content and technical management. Adjuncts are evaluated every two weeks to see how much they are interacting with students.
The result is that although teaching online then becomes an activity which adjuncts cannot just “fit in” during coffee breaks throughout the day, the students should benefit from a more reflective process of course creation and moderation. As well, instructors have the ION courses paid for through CDL, which means that, after teaching for a few semesters, we can easily put the resulting certification on our CV. (This is especially useful for me as a PhD student looking at the job market down the road…how many philosophy PhDs can say they’ve had training in how to teach?)
There’s also something that feels right about having to take online courses at the same time as giving them, although it does make my summer schedule a bit tighter. Frustrated by dead links, too-lengthy or too-ambiguous emails from instructors? Having that experience yourself may make you rethink your own classroom approach.
I’ll try to post a few reflections from what I’m learning in terms of educational strategies here. It may be that they’ll be cross-posted from my required discussion boards, though!
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